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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst: ‘I wrote letters to my schoolfriends in dwarfish runes’

Alan Hollinghurst.
‘Edmund White opened my mind to the freedoms a gay writer could now take’ … Alan Hollinghurst. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

My earliest reading memory
AA Milne’s When We Were Very Young. I knew most of the poems by heart from having them read to me, and I can still just capture the moment when chanting along and pretending to be able to read morphed magically into knowing and reading the words for myself.

My favourite book growing up
Anything by PG Wodehouse, but most of all the books about Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, brilliantly played on TV in the 1960s by Dennis Price and Ian Carmichael. At school we all imitated both of them, and I carried on speaking like Jeeves for years, which must have become quite annoying for everyone else.

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